Scattered Thoughts . . .

Bachmann, O scale, narrow gauge, 4-6-0 steam locomotive. I've been trying to get up to speed with Digital Command Control (DCC) for model trains for the past few months. Well... I started trying to educate myself a couple of years ago but have had difficulty grasping how to fully utilize DCC without having a locomotive to program or even a DCC controller. Over the past year or so, I've collected some DCC locomotives and a couple of different control systems. I'm learning more but it is a bit frustrating for a few reasons. First off, if you want to take a fairly easy route, you can just buy a DCC locomotive and use it in its default configuration with just about any DCC controller. This is certainly the easiest and quickest way to get up and running in DCC. That is not me though. I like to perfect things to my own preferences. I'd like to write a blog post about all the difficulties in programming... all the different DCC systems available today... compatibili

I'm taking it easy again today after another rather miserable night of poor health last night so I'm looking for things to do which won't worsen my health.  As I was looking at the photography gear on the shelves, I remembered that I wanted to try to use some extension tubes the next time I head outside with my camera... so, I evaluated the situation... I no longer felt miserable... the weather is nice although still slightly too warm for me for extended periods... and the camera gear was just sitting there doing nothing too. It was a good time to attempt to do some photography.  I grabbed a Sony camera body... a 70-200mm lens which wasn't long enough without the use of extension tubes the last time I attempted to shoot flowers with this lens... and I grabbed my extension tubes.  Every lens has a minimum distance you need to be from your subject in order for your lens to focus. If you get too close, it won't focus on your subject. I think the minimum distance

I had thought it was a pretty lousy night last night with all that nausea... tonight has been far worse being sick as a dog in the bathroom. I had some sudden anaphylactic-type symptoms as well as nausea and stomach cramps... then all the even worse miserable symptoms hit and I spent far too much time and energy being sick. I've now taken my nighttime medications, extra medications and emergency medications... and, right now, I feel rather poorly which is a significant improvement from my time in the bathroom... but, I feel as though I'll probably be back in the bathroom before long... I'd just like to sleep peacefully.... UPDATE:  It is the following morning and my biggest issue this morning is that I am worn out, generally feeling lousy and I am groggy from the emergency medications. Oh... and these emergency medications make me very hungry!  

I managed to get a little bit more work done on this hopper conversion project today. (As mentioned in previous blog entries, I'm converting four American Flyer S scale hoppers to O scale narrow gauge hoppers.)  Last weekend, I had previously cut two different sizes of bulkhead shims for shimming the coupler boxes to the correct height from the rail but I had not glued them in place. That was today's job.  Since I had already pre-cut all the shims, today's work was fairly easy. I had a little bit of trimming to do on the first of eight sets of shims but I today's task was to simply glue each shim in place with some super-glue gel.  Next, I can glue some brake wheels in place on one end of each hopper. Hopefully that will be quick and easy task too. Hmmm... I need to pick up more glue first... I just remembered that I also need to build or buy some stirrup steps for each of the four hoppers. Once these are installed then I can spray paint each of the cars...  L

Last night, I made some Korean ribs for dinner.   Well... I really should call it a "Korean-ish" dish since we lack some of the ingredients for true Korean food (and some of those ingredients should never be in any food). I replaced some ingredients with things we can get locally, yet, even that was difficult and required some driving around. The ribs were delicious as usual. I served them over white rice and garnished the plate with chopped green onions. We also added some Indian flavor in the form of Naan bread since we had some leftover from another dish we made the other night. This garlic Naan bread fit in well with this tasty dish. Unfortunately, my health does not agree all that well with meals such as this... even with me adapting some ingredients. Dinner was absolutely delicious but my health crashed which quickly turned the night into a night of nausea.  When the nausea got to unbearable levels, I took my bedtime dose of medications (it was only about 8:15pm

My health has been interfering with everything for the past week and even interfering with something as simple as putting together blog posts and sorting through photos so I haven't posted much lately.  I've been wanting to write about bringing the grandkids to the Montshire Museum of Science last weekend because it was a pleasant surprise for them and they had a great time... actually, Gee and I had a great time too! I shot a few dozen photographs and hope to put an album together to share but, for now, we'll just have to settle for one photo from that outing.  Here is one photo of Lukey that I really liked from that day...